From Now On The Educational Technology Journal

Vol 9|No 7|March|2000

Some monitors blow up the size of everything so that little content shows up on each screen and the reader if forced to scroll frequently. What if you don't know what is hiding? Out of sight is out of mind?   Viewability Sometimes the screen just seems too small to capture an image or allow us to scan more than a few lines of text. This varies dramatically from monitor screen to screen, of course. Older, smaller, 14" screens with poor resolution make it very hard to see and find things. Newer, larger screens with high resolution are better, but unless you have a big budget, screens can be pretty frustrating. Screens can make it very difficult to explore large images and they may also force a huge amount of uncomfortable scrolling. Printed books may still win out when it comes to art, maps, illustrations and the display of long text passages. Web designers, if they are sensitive to their readers, usually limit contents of a page to a table no larger than 500 pixels in width. That is what you see in front of you right now. This size table fits into any size monitor without running off the page, but some designers seem to ignore this issue.     Back to When the Book Back to March Contents Credits: The photographs were shot by Jamie McKenzie. Icons from Jay Boersma at (http://www.ECNet.Net/users/gas52r0/Jay/home.html)Copyright Policy: Materials published in From Now On may be duplicated in hard copy format if unchanged in format and content for educational, nonprofit school district and university use only and may also be sent from person to person by e-mail. This copyright statement must be included. All other uses, transmissions and duplications are prohibited unless permission is granted expressly. Showing these pages remotely through frames is not permitted. FNO is applying for formal copyright registration for articles. From Now On Index Page